Designing a welcoming restaurant is no mean feat. At first, it involves paying attention to your target audience, your environment and what kind of establishment you want to be. Once you have decided upon these factors, you can begin looking towards deciding on the finer details, and what you want to incorporate into your restaurant.
Start with the outside
The outside of your restaurant will be the first contact your customers will have with your establishment, so it is important to make a good impression from the very beginning. People tend to make their mind up on whether they like something or not within the first seven seconds of seeing it, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for error!
Having a well-lit restaurant from the outside will create an inviting atmosphere, helping to draw people in. How you do this is completely up to you; you can either opt for a warm subtle tone, with a lot of subtle pools of lights, encouraging guests to explore further, or have a more dramatic environment, with flood lights lighting your restaurant up.
Being able to see the inside from the outside is also a great feature to have. It shows transparency in your establishment, whilst also displaying the mood and tone of your restaurant to potential guests, encouraging them to explore further.
Many restaurants have taken to making use of their outdoor area, which adds more features to their restaurant without too much expense. This is also beneficial to customers, as the option to sit outside provides a different scenery to enjoy, this can be achieved through canopies, beer gardens, gazebo’s and water features. These keep your outside as visually stimulating as the inside.
The restaurants flow
Having a functional flow to your space is crucial to making your customers feel relaxed, and your employees work efficiently. Having a point to greet customers when they first walk in is always a good way to invite people in, whilst displaying your restaurant, enticing them to discover more.
Your restaurants flow should accommodate everyone, from couples to large groups. Often allocating sections depending on the size of the group attending. This way you can have quieter sections for those who just want a meal and a drink, or more lively places for those who have come for parties and such.
Design elements
The design elements of your restaurant should be subjective to your own taste, but your target audience should be taken into account too. Having a country themed restaurant in the middle of a bustling city strip probably isn’t the best idea, so incorporating your environment, customers and atmosphere into your design is always a good idea.
To add some life into your restaurant, you can add in talking points of features, such as fireplaces, chandeliers or pictures on the walls, which create more of an atmosphere to make your guests feel more at home while they are enjoying themselves. To go a step further, an open kitchen is a very popular feature in many restaurants, as this adds some theatre elements into your restaurant, and adds on to the restaurant experience.
If you are looking to refurb your restaurant, why not contact Lake contracts to see how we can help you!